Has Microsoft Lost The Plot?

I made a comment on a blog post over at The Loop which I quite liked. I didn’t want it to just disappear so I thought I’d put a copy here:

Microsoft have lost the plot.

They appear to be hanging *everything* on two fallacious premises:1) Users want the exact same interface across every device they have.2) Users want to have MS Office on every device they have and will start buying devices with MS Office on once they are available.

No. 1 is quite daft to me – and many others from my experience. On my mobile touch screen device, I want an interface that is designed to work well on a mobile touch screen device. On my desktop, I want an interface that is designed to work well on a desktop. Etc.

As far as this “we’ve listened to our users and bought back the Start button” thing goes – from what I can tell, it’s not the Start button that people wanted back and/or missed from the pre-Metro days – it was the Start *Menu*.

And they haven’t bought that back at all. Forcing people to change interface paradigms every time they want to find an app is, again, daft.